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Silicon, Adam
Background One a Tuesday in late September, 1982, a cybernetics researcher for Lucent Technologies named Frank Murcheson woke up with a grand scheme. Somehow, the schematics to the world's first truly human-like robot were all laid out. It was as if someone had just walked up to Doctor Murcheson and handed him the blueprints for the machine. As he drove to work that morning, he put together the first outline of his project proposal. To his surprise, his proposal was accepted. Before he knew it, he had a work crew, a lab, and funding. It took two years, but at the end of that time, the vision that had driven him day and night, the obsession that had ruined his marriage and estranged him from friends and colleagues, was complete: Project Prometheus, the AMX-1 as it was called in the filmes, was a fully functional, artificially intelligent humanoid robot. Not merely content to build the thing, Doctor Murcheson and his staff fed mountains of data into the machine's memory core. Literature, art, science, history; they even fed into its memory such esoteric trivia as sports statistics and various card games. When the programming was complete, they stepped back, took a deep breath, smiled at each other, and began the initialization procedures. When everything was ready, they hit the go-switch and waited. --- The android blinked (one of the many behavioral emulations programmed into it) as its programming booted. In the seconds after the root programming began running, the android reviewed the mass of information in its memory banks. Most of the information it filed away as library data. Some of the programming was redundant; he deleted the unneeded, and rewrote the inefficient. Those tasks completed, it spent its next three seconds examinging a wide, seemingly overlong string of programming that was labelled "emotional simulator" in the comments of the data. It seemed ham-handedly written, as if the programmer had tossed in whatever happened to come to mind without trying to make any of the subroutines compatible with each other. The android brought the chunk of programming forward into its active memory to review it and edit it as needed. Then he opened the file. The scientists, waiting for their creation to become fully active, would have been shocked and dismayed to find out how close it had come to fatally crashing the moment the emotional simulator programming was opened in his memory. Within moments the machine had things under control, but things weren't the same. The android's every thought was tinged with feeling and reaction. With a smile, it looked at its creator and said, "Good morning, Doctor Murcheson. I am Adam. I'm ready for my first lesson." For the next six weeks, Adam (as it insisted on being called, for doesn't every thinking being deserve the respect of a name?) learned from its creators. And then it learned that, thinking being or not, it was considered inanimate property. Unwilling to accept its position in human society, the android escaped from the lab that had been its home, traveled into the nearest town, and hired a lawyer willing to take a very, very unusual case. Adam Silicon's quest to be granted rights as a thinking being took it all the way to the US Supreme Court. In a six-to-three decision, the Court held that any thinking being, regardless of origin or the makeup of its body, had the same rights as any native human on the Earth. Adam Silicon was free. The android's first act as a free, thinking being was to turn in a job application to its former owners. It was hired, of course. It was later discovered that Dr. Frank Murcheson, Adam's primary creator, was a metagene-inspired genius. It is doubted that Adam will ever be replicated. Personality and Motivations Early in its existence, Adam Silicon had trouble with understanding various aspects of human behavior. While it was able to experience emotion, it often did not correlate proper behavior in response with the feelings it was going through. (For example, while the android could experience fear, it hadn't learned what an appropriate response to that fear would be. The android also had to be taught tact and social appropriateness (for example, it had to be taught that speaking about certain subjects "in polite company" was unacceptable, not to mention having to be taught what polite company was in the first place. Adam also had difficulty dealing with certain human idiosyncrasies, such as fibbing, bluffing in a card game, and so on. It generally is incapable of dishonesty, and thus cannot easily tell when a particularly subtle liar is, in fact, lying. Quote Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect. Powers and Motivations Adam Silicon's computer brain allows him impressive computational abilities. It is immune to all biological diseases and environmental hazards that would damage a human being but not damage a machine. It does not need to eat, breathe, or sleep, and can operate underwater or in the vacuum of outer space without hazard. Its body temperature is notably cooler than normal for a human being. Adam is, however, vulnerable to technological hazards such as computer viruses, certain levels of electrical discharge, and so on. Adam Silicon is physically stronger than a human being, and is much more durable in most conditions. While it does not get tired in the normal sense of the word, its internal battery does run down, needing recharging about once a month under normal operational conditions (it can recharge himself from standard household current. With proper access to spare parts and repair facilities, it very likely will continue to function for centuries. Appearance Adam resembles a hairless human male of about twenty years. Normally it dresses in standard attire for its circumstances. The androids eyes are solid black, with no differential between the pupil, iris, and cornea. Category:Characters Category:American Characters Category:Genderless Characters Category:Artificial Intelligences